SAP is definitely taking a big risk with Hana for Business Suite. I asked around at Saphire but so far I fail to be convinced that Hana is truly ready for transaction processing on the type of scale and with the sort of SLA that large businesses require. What makes me suspicious is that nobody is willing or able to discuss real-life numbers about Hana for ERP like how many SAPS Hana can actually deliver on specific hardware configurations. In my book that means Hana is not ready for real.Before I am comfortable recommending running our ERP on Hana I need to see tangible proof. In the mean time we are looking to drop Oracle for our ERP this year and right now our best option looks to be Sybase. At Sapphire I heard there are over 1000 deployments of ERP on Sybase today, overall this sounds more realistic than ERP on Hana.

I ran into another analyst at Sapphire who said he though SAP is "taking a big risk" rushing Business Suite on Hana to market. Snabe said "We would never announce a product as generally available unless we felt we have a solid solution," but I seem to remember that Business ByDesign was withdrawn from the market after launch because SAP determined it had the architecture all wrong.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.